There is an insidious and largely unseen effort by the White House to silence the handful of voices that remain true to the black prophetic tradition. This tradition, which stretches back to Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, has consistently named and damned the cruelty of imperialism and white supremacy. It has done so with a clarity and moral force that have eluded most other critics of American capitalism. President Barack Obama first displayed his fear of this tradition when he betrayed his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, abetting the brutal character assassination of one of the church’s most prophetic voices. And he has sustained this assault, largely through black surrogates such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, Tom Joyner and Steve Harvey, in vicious attacks on Cornel West.
“Jeremiah Wright was the canary in the mine,” West said when we met a few days ago in Princeton, N.J. “The black prophetic tradition has been emptied out. Its leaders have either been murdered or incarcerated. … A lot of political prisoners who represent the black prophetic tradition [are] in jail. They have been in there for decades. Or we have leaders who have completely sold out. They have been co-opted. And these are the three major developments. With sold-out leaders you get a pacified followership or people who are scared.”
“The black prophetic tradition has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf,” West said. “What has kept American democracy from going fascist or authoritarian or autocratic has been the legacy of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Martin King, Fannie Lou Hamer. This is not because black people have a monopoly on truth, goodness or beauty. It is because the black freedom movement puts pressure on the American empire in the name of integrity, decency, honesty and virtue.”
The tradition is sustained by a handful of beleaguered writers and intellectuals, including Glen Ford and his Black Agenda Report, James Cone, Carl Dix, Bruce Dixon, Boyce Watkins, Yvette Carnell, Robin Kelley, Margaret Kimberley, Nellie Bailey, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, Maulana Karenga, Ajamu Baraka and Wright, but none have the public profile of West, who is routinely attacked by Obama’s black supporters as a “race traitor,” the equivalent of a “self-hating Jew” to hard-line supporters of Israel. It is understandable why this tradition frightens Obama. It exposes him as the ideological heir of Booker T. Washington, a black accommodationist whose core message to black people was, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, “adjustment and submission.” The wide swath of destruction Obama has overseen on behalf of the corporate state includes the eradication of most of our civil liberties and our privacy, the expansion of imperial war, the use of kill lists, abject subservience to Wall Street’s criminal class and the military-industrial complex, the relentless persecution of whistle-blowers, mass incarceration of poor people of color and the failure to ameliorate the increasing distress of the poor and the working class. His message to the black underclass in the midst of the corporate rape of the nation is drawn verbatim from the Booker T. Washington playbook. He tells them to work harder—as if anyone works harder than the working poor in this country—and obey the law.
Related articles
- Cornel West: It’s “Grounds For Impeachment” If Obama Bombs Syria Without Congressional Approval (buzzfeed.com)
- Cornel West: MSNBC & Their ‘Rent-A-Negro’ Phenomenon (atlanta.cbslocal.com)
- Cornel West Attacks Al Sharpton: ‘Bonafide House Negro of the Obama Plantation’ (mediaite.com)
- Cornel West: Obama is a ‘global George Zimmerman’ (thegrio.com)
Always Question Authority 
Speaking truth to power, questioning authority have been the distinguishing features of the black prophetic tradition. It was an undervalued factor in the abolitionist movement and was the driving force of the modern civil rights movement. West, Cone, and others continue this tradition. While I value the courage, commitment, and role of the prophetic voice, I try not to get swept away in its assumptions of an unambiguous, single truth world. Governing is hard, ambiguous work. B.T. Washington was faced with the horrendous reality of rampant lynching in the late nineteenth century. Obama is faced with lynching’s political equivalency, a revival of latent racist sentiment. Obama’s greatest achievement will always be that he even got elected; that remains our single greatest hope for our future as a plural nation. If he had offered a full-throated defense of Wright, he would not have been elected. It’s well and fine to criticize Obama, as in his strange and perplexing Syrian adventure, but it’s also well to remember that prophets don’t have to govern. As West says, their job is to help leaven the loaf, but they don’t have to bake it.